Ziad sez, "I interviewed C418; we talk about Minecraft's early days, the purchase by Microsoft, how the gaming community has helped him become a self-sustaining, independent musician, and creativity in the gaming industry."

Launched in 2009, Minecraft is a sprawling, endlessly-replayable "sandbox" game that dumps the player in a randomly-generated abstract world. By exploring, gathering materials, crafting items and equipping their avatars, players can set about surviving hostile fauna, launching expeditions deep into ore-filled caverns, and constructing anything from huts to palaces, and even vast machines.

The phenomenal appeal and success of Minecraft -- just check our archives over the last few years! -- is hard to define, but it's been downloaded more than 100 million times since its inception. Created by Markus "Notch" Persson, Minecraft remains the most popular game on Xbox, and the most popular paid game on iOS and Android, according to the AP.

Yet that word hardly scratches the surface of the blocky world-simulator's Lego-like possibilities, though: a fact hit on by Satya Nadella, Microsoft's new CEO, who said that it was "more than a game."

"It is an open world platform, driven by a vibrant community we care deeply about, and rich with new opportunities for that community and for Microsoft," Nadella was quoted as saying in the press release. Microsoft expects to close the sale by the end of 2014, and break even by the end of 2015.

Microsoft also committed to keeping Minecraft available on all the platforms on which it is available today, including Sony Playstation and cellphones running Apple and Google-based operating systems

"Yes, the deal is real," wrote Mojang's Owen Hill at the company's official blog. " ... Please remember that the future of Minecraft and you – the community – are extremely important to everyone involved. If you take one thing away from this post, let it be that."

Notch, he wrote, didn't want the responsibility of owning a company that had become globally successul, and had found that the pressure of owning Minecraft made it impossible to work on other projects.

Here's Microsoft's press release, in full:

Microsoft Corp. today announced it has reached an agreement to acquire Mojang, the celebrated Stockholm-based game developer, and the company’s iconic “Minecraft” franchise.

The Mojang team will join Microsoft Studios, which includes the studios behind global blockbuster franchises “Halo,” “Forza,” “Fable” and more. Microsoft’s investments in cloud and mobile technologies will enable “Minecraft” players to benefit from richer and faster worlds, more powerful development tools, and more opportunities to connect across the “Minecraft” community.

Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will acquire Mojang for $2.5 billion. Microsoft expects the acquisition to be break-even in FY15 on a GAAP basis. Subject to customary closing conditions and any regulatory review, the acquisition is expected to close in late 2014.

Available across multiple platforms, “Minecraft” is one of the most popular video games in history, with more than 100 million downloads, on PC alone, by players since its launch in 2009. “Minecraft” is one of the top PC games of all time, the most popular online game on Xbox, and the top paid app for iOS and Android in the US. The “Minecraft” community is among the most active and passionate in the industry, with more than 2 billion hours played on Xbox 360 alone in the past two years. Minecraft fans are loyal, with nearly 90 percent of paid customers on the PC having signed in within the past 12 months.

“Gaming is a top activity spanning devices, from PCs and consoles to tablets and mobile, with billions of hours spent each year,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “Minecraft is more than a great game franchise – it is an open world platform, driven by a vibrant community we care deeply about, and rich with new opportunities for that community and for Microsoft.”

“The ‘Minecraft’ players have taken the game and turned it into something that surpassed all of our expectations. The acquisition by Microsoft brings a new chapter to the incredible story of ‘Minecraft,’” said Carl Manneh, CEO, Mojang. “As the founders move on to start new projects, we believe the high level of creativity from the community will continue the game’s success far into the future.”

Microsoft plans to continue to make “Minecraft” available across all the platforms on which it is available today: PC, iOS, Android, Xbox and PlayStation.

“‘Minecraft’ is one of the most popular franchises of all time,” said Phil Spencer, head of Xbox. “We are going to maintain ‘Minecraft’ and its community in all the ways people love today, with a commitment to nurture and grow it long into the future.”

"Minecraft is digital Lego," says Lego marketing director David Gram. "We only wish we had invented it." This is mentioned in about the same breath as the phrase "core brand beliefs," a concise reminder why they didn't.

Glenn Fleishman writes, "Minecraft YouTube videos are fantastically popular, and a core group of producers of these videos have enjoyed a wild ride up the virtual charts. Diamond Minecart, a YouTube channel by 22-year-old Daniel Middleton of Northamptonshire, England, has almost 1.9 million subscribers, and people have watched his videos over 400 million times."

My daughter Jane (age 11) grew bored with World of Warcraft (at least for now), but her passion for Minecraft has not waned after a couple of years of playing it. She and her friends love to create towns with libraries, city halls, apartments, subway systems, farms, and jails. I enjoy playing Minecraft with her, too.

If you are interested in getting started in Minecraft, buy it and start chopping and digging. Get answers to your questions by asking your kids, and referring to YouTube and Minecraft wikis. If that's still not enough, here are a few recommended Minecraft books:

The Minecraft Guide for Parents, by Cori Dusmann. This is especially good for parents of younger kids who need help buying and installing Minecraft. It also has good tips on how to play Minecraft with your kids.

Christopher Mitchell, a PhD candidate in NYU's Computer Science program, is building a 1:1 scale model of Manhattan in Minecraft, with faithful, handmade reproductions of each of the island's skyscrapers. He's relying on data from diverse sources, including Google Earth, and the model to date is 277m^2, with 71Bm^3 of volumetric detail, running on a 200 core cluster with 200GB of RAM. It's part of a larger project (!), called Sparseworld, through which Mitchell is combining data from diverse geographical and architectural systems to faithfully model the physical world.

Derryl Murphy sez, "My son is home sick and found this video showing a 3D printer ItsJustJumby created for working inside the world of Minecraft. The engineering is way beyond the two of us, but we both still find it amazing and fascinating."

I could watch this all day. The description's actually very clear, and extremely clever. Great engineering smarts on display.

It's 85 minutes long, and it gets right into the meat of things. There are interviews with Notch, the Mojang crew, and game design luminaries, but the documentarians also capture the game's vibe in a way that few others do: that strange, expansive sense of place. You can download a DRM-free HD copy at the official website. [Video Link]

Minecraft's real star is its landscape, flowing psuedo-randomly from whatever name you give your world. But it also became a checkerboard of predictable components: rolling hills here, weirdly-shaped mountains there, and perhaps an abrupt patch of swamp or tropical jungle between them.

But not anymore: a new update, out today, revises the land-making algorithms and adds a bunch of new biomes--areas with a distinctive climate type, flora and fauna--and creates more natural transitions between them. There are cliffs, giant lakes, canyons, redwood forests, all sorts of new flowers and grasses, the option of wildly eroded "skylands", as pictured above, and much else besides.

A lot of other things are also improved in the "snapshot" preview of Minecraft 1.7, including a far more elaborate fishing system: you may now find all sorts of things in the water. This Reddit thread has all the details. (Note: If installing the snapshot release, it'll create ugly seams in saved worlds anywhere that the old meets the new)

Lego announced two new Minecraft micro-worlds. The Village and The Nether measure 3”x3”x3” , and will be available September 1. If you can't wait, you can get the 480-piece Lego Minecraft building set now.

This five-minute video takes you on a tour of the astounding Beetlejuice roller-coaster created by Nuropsych1 and friends. It incorporates many of the best visual elements from this outstanding film, all set to an excellent remix of the Beetlejuice soundtrack, one of the great instrumental pieces of all time.

This was done on the XBOX 360 in creative mode. We worked on it off and on for two months.

Pixelated indie RPG Minecraft now has the ability to use animated textures for its chunky world-blocks. Perhaps you're thinking that the modding community will be use this feature to create subtly-windswept vegetation and more convincing lava? No. It will be used to make you retch. [via RPS]

ThinkGeek's Minecraft Light-Up Torch is funnier if you speak one of the Commonwealth English variants where "torch" is a synonym for "flashlight" -- but even in the rest of the world, it's still pretty awesome.

The Kickstarter-funded documentary about Minecraft and its creator, Markus "Notch" Persson, debuts on Saturday, December 22 on Xbox Live. Some time after that, the video will come out on DVD.

Some Minecraft players are upset that Xbox Gold subscribers are going get to see the crowdfunded documentary before folks who both donated money to the Kickstarter campaign and bought the game. Oh well, here's a 20-minute short documentary that everyone can watch now. [UPDATE: A spokesperson for the production company, 2 Player Productions, says: "The DVD and digital download version is coming out the 23rd, and Kickstarter backers are getting it before the Xbox screening."]

This adorable Makie doll went to MineCon, a Minecraft convention in Paris, with its owner MoggyMoo and her son, a Minecraft enthusiast. In honour of the occasion, Moggymoo knit a tiny custom Minecraft creeper jumper for it to wear.

CaptainSparklez's "Minecraft Style" is a spot-on perfect "Gangnam Style" parody featuring all the eight-bit tropes and memes we love from Minecraft, scaled up in glorious jaggievision. Love the "sexy piggies."

Diggin' a hole, just one more time until I score this
Strike rich on diamonds, iron, gold and build our decked out fortress
All we need is just a bit of luck to not abort this
Runnin' low we can't afford this

Dungeons under here
Just the last time a group of creepers came out over there
Blew up a vein of diamonds then chased us all out of there
A spider army dropped down from the roof into our hair
Ran back to fresh air

Ben Purdy created this incredibly fun "real life Minecraft" game, which was set up and relentlessly thrashed at XOXOfest in Portland.

I would like to, in no sarcastic manner what-so-ever, officially dedicate this to all the people who commented on my original minecraft block video and accused me of faking it via green screens, after effects, black screens, blue screen, gray screens, etc. Looking forward to comments that the whole thing is staged and all those people are actors that are just pretending to hit the blocks.

I can assure you he does not lie, as I gave it a good thorough pounding myself. The textures are in fact projected onto the boxes; the implement is a foam pixel-art pickaxe. [via YouTube]

Jeff sez, "Some gamers need a Railgun, others choose an M1A1, most seem to desire an Energy Sword...but what we need is a pickaxe! That's right, our current favorite diversion from lab work is Minecraft. We didn't want the fun to stop on the screen, so we created giant, 3-D, papercraft Minecraft terrains on our walls and show you how to build your own."

A wild array of new features arrived today for Minecraft, the all-conquering digital RPG Lego addiction vortex: trading with villagers, bonus chests in new worlds, and countless new map features and block types are in the list. Most interesting of all, though, is the new (and definitively alpha) "adventure mode", which makes it far harder to move or destroy blocks—an essential tool for map-sharing storytellers. [RPS]

I swear that when I wrote this, I had not seen this PBS Idea Channel video, which argues that Minecraft and 3D printers will usher in a post-scarcity economy.

From the Jetsons to Cory Doctorow, science fiction writers of all stripes have imagined a world where any object could be instantly created. Modern economics on the other hand, is built on the principle of competition for scarce resources. And while it may not seem like a video game and printer could alter this economic reality, we beg to differ. Minecraft's creative mode is the perfect vehicle for understanding a Post-Scarcity world; a place where resources are permanently available and constantly regenerated. It shows that with unlimited resources, people end up creating amazing digital structures! Of course, a world of infinitely available resources seems pretty fantastical until you consider the Makerbot and the future of 3D printing. The Makerbot is an at home device that allow you to print real three dimensional objects, meaning a Minecraftian future where you can print anything you want at anytime might not be that far away.

Matt and Asia are simply the most perfect couple ever. They met through their church (Matt said he fell for her watching her dance, awww) but they truly bonded over the game of Minecraft. They built a house together in the digital world and have been inseparable ever since, both in the game and in real life. Matt even proposed to Asia up on stage at MineCon with the help of the game’s creators. So it was no surprise that Matt and Asia would plan a Minecraft themed wedding, and wow, did they ever. They worked hard and put together an incredible event, which truly reflected their love for Minecraft, ahem, each other! We felt so lucky to capture such an awesome day, both in photos and with a wedding film (at the end of this post). It was a labor of love with lots of DIY and help from some fellow Minecraft lovers. Matt, Asia and friends created the pixel-trees from cardboard boxes and used them to decorate the structural pillars, genius!